Original Literary Works

Month: December 2017

Je Suis Moi, as the reader may know, had been an Existentialist before he perused Pence’s classic, Donald The Great, About Whom Nothing Greater Can Be Thought, which led to his free subscription to the How to Make Yourself Great Again Channel, and, ultimately, to his magic mushroom conversion to Egotism.

He had been a very depressed existentialist at that. He found no joy in the concept that life was meaningless so one should be happy with a menial job providing there was sufficient budget after rent and enough time off work to get a suntan, drink tequila, consort with prostitutes, and smoke hashish. What depressed him all along was the absurd notion essential to existentialism, that existence was before Being because all the misconceptions of Being got humans in trouble, even caused wars.

He intuited that he was not a speck of dirt, a tomato living in the now, or a naked ape with some kind of being pasted on as an afterthought. There is certainly a more essential being, some Being that comes before existence, as we should all know by now, but he did not know who he originally was. If he did, he would have gone home again.

“Existence in itself does not even exist,” he thought during one of his drunken mental masturbations. “I am someone at least, someone that actually is, that is what comes first, not existence.”

He mentioned his doubts to a fellow kitchen worker, who handed him a dog-eared copy of Donald The Great.

“Don’t be stupid, stupid, read this,” said the short order cook, “everyone else has, and become someone, an independent contractor like the rest of us.”

Sure enough, Donald The Great not only confirmed that he was someone, but that he was whatever he thought he was, and that was always something very, very great, indeed, because he was once very great and could be even greater again, thus he was born again.

It would not be long before he encountered Maya, his alter ego, a dissident from French Welandia, and changed his name to Je Suis Moi. He signed on to the independent contractor program at work, convinced, despite Maya’s advice, that he would be so great again that he would never need social benefits.

He would be promoted to server two years later. He was laid off and found himself without unemployment benefits. The benefits would have been minimal anyway, and not because of his low pay: no more than a thousand workers in Melandia, most of them Welandians with temporary permits to work jobs Melandians did not want, were contributing into the fund.

Maya, once a jurist in France, now reduced to selling drawings of Je Suis Moi on the sidewalks, threatened to leave him unless he got another job. Wherefore he contracted for doorman work at Trump Island, known as “Puerto Rico” before Donald the Great purchased it with a Russian loan after forcing it into bankruptcy liquidation.

His egotistical expectations exceeded his station there and it was not long before the both of them were deported with only each other and the clothes on their backs. They managed to escape from the ship bound for Welandia and made their way to Chania, capital of Independent Crete, where Je Suis Moi took a dishwasher job, immersed himself in Greek myths and imagined himself not only to be the famous Cretan necromancer, Epimenides, but the personification of Zeus from time to time.

Such was the tremendous influence of the book Donald The Great that it literally saved Je Suis Moi’s life, for he had decided that a merely existential life was not worth living, and he would have ended his if Pence’s book had not been thrust into his hands on that fateful day in the kitchen.

The excuse for the new deduction from income passed through defined business entities was said to compensate for a radical reduction in C-corporation tax. Shareholders who take dividends are in effect taxed twice, once at the corporate level and then at the personal level. So-called pass-through income is taxed whether retained or paid out, so now a percentage of that will not be taxable up to a limit, and a provision for game-playing is made after that limit is reached. True parity would eliminate corporate taxation altogether, leaving only the personal income tax. Income retained to be employed for growth would not be taxed. The current change actually increases inequity by disfavoring employees and encouraging them to become fake “self-employed” capitalists doing the same work, and by benefiting wealthy beneficial owners who do not need the taxation deduction from income passed through to them. In any case, the problem is the deficit, so the Hogs will attempt to reduce the welfare of 90-percent of the population, providing them with temporary scraps to avert immediate rebellion until the Boars take over.

Experts who perceive President Trump as Hog-in-Chief believe charities will lose billions because the standard deduction has been doubled are probably mistaken. Charitable donations were not always deductible. People donate to charities to be charitable, and not for tax deductions. Besides, the values of things donated are often exaggerated to reduce taxes, and the system is otherwise gamed without benefit to the needy. People who itemize generally have more to donate. A single person who itemizes instead of taking the new $12,200 standard deduction may still deduct his or her charitable contributions. The needy might be served better if donations could be deducted “above the line” i.e. in addition to the standard deduction. Still, historical data indicates that donations do not depend on tax deductibility. That is not to say the tax reform is not hoggish. It certainly is. The rich will become richer and the poor even poorer and more people will depend on private handouts. The pendulum will swing back, perhaps with violent effects on animal farming, so that the Boar dictates instead of the Hog.

My friend in North France believes her jaw is too wide, but I believe a rounder face is more beautiful than one with small mouth and markedly pointed chin. The wider face was believed to be that of the Cro-Magnon woman much loved in France by Neanderthal man. She is an artist, and Cro-Magnon people were artists as well as hunter-gatherers. Sadly, artists do not reconstruct skulls to flatter prehistoric humans according to modern standards of beauty. My Frankish friend also says her coworkers made fun of her because we are friends, and they see me as an old man. It is true that we are friends, meaning “free.” And I am actually much older than they think, nearly 200,000 years old

We were glad for our freedom when we first heard the tidings about the difference between good and evil and about our power to choose between them.

“Hear ye all who come to inquire about the truth. We praise the wise one and we thank him for providing us a with a good mind in accord with the divine law firmly written in the heavens. Now listen to this truth and meditate upon it, that each man must decide for himself what he believes and choose accordingly. In the beginning two spirits, the best and the worst in thought, words, and deeds, proclaimed themselves. From these two, those of good knowledge chose aright, and those of evil knowledge did not. The two spirits created life and death and being and nothingness when they first came together. Certainly those…

History is a mistake as far as many people are concerned. I think Albert Camus said something to the effect that losses are best known through the longing for what did not occur. That is true for many people who wish they had done more with their lives. They long for what they wanted to occur but did not occur; therefore, for them, history is a record of mistakes. Needless to say, those who were educated to believe in free will feel responsible for those mistakes, thus when they long for what did not occur, they suffer from bad conscience or guilt.

I have heard that many older people get bitter. I am not bitter, yet, I think I might drink the bitter tea lest I become bitter. As I age, I feel increasingly disappointed with every…

The Groundhog issue is too important to be held hostage to semantics. For instance, Nietzsche put forth that our realities are linguistic creations; that is, we reify through language. Appearances that we appropriate through naming eventually become essences and things. T. Beckman (1995) wrote:

“Nietzsche supposes that there is not much difference between realists and idealists, objectivists and subjectivists, except for linguistic habit. At bottom, all of these stem from origins in our passions, fantasies, and interests.”

Now that’s a sharp slap in the face of our rational underpinnings, or at least what we’ve psychologized of our rational underpinnings. Additionally, if we are to consider anything of Nietzsche’s meditations on the nature of what we call…